Ottoman Orientalism USSAMA MAKDISI IN AN AGE OF WESTERN-DOMINATED MODERNITY, every nation creates its own Orient. The nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire was no exception. This article builds on several important studies that have critically analyzed how Europeans portrayed the Ottomans as a brooding non-Western despotism incapable of "progress" and how the Ottomans responded to, and resisted, these portrayals. 1 But these studies have only hinted at the ramifications of non-Western responses to modern imperialism for the modality, the scope, the difference, and the meaning of Orientalist discourses as they traverse historical and national boundaries. This essay, therefore, extends Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism by looking at how Ottomans represented their own Arab periphery as an integral part of their engagement with, explicit resistance to, but also implicit acceptance of, Western representations of the indolent Ottoman East. 2 Such an investigation requires a complication of the simple dichotomy of Western imperialism/non-Western resistance that has charac- terized so much recent historiography of the Ottoman and non-Western world. This essay begins by laying out the theoretical framework of what I call Ottoman Orientalism and explains the historical context within which I am using the term. It then describes a classical Ottoman imperial paradigm based on a hierarchical system of subordination along religious, class, and ethnic lines. It focuses primarily on Mount Lebanon to illustrate how an avowedly Muslim dynastic state emphasized 1 The works of Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876-1909 (London, 1998), and Zeynep <;elik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), are foundational in this regard. See also Fatma Miige G6<;ek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of the Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (New York, 1996); and M. §iikrii Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York, 1995); Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford, 2001). See K. E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece (Princeton, N.J., 1999), for an example of the manipulation of Western Orientalist imagery by Ali Pasha. For the study of power in Egypt, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, 1988). 2 Western representations of the indolent Orient were a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought, as is evident in Montesquieu's Persian Letters, to name just one famous text. This essay assumes the reader is familiar with such representations, which have been the subject of countless books and articles. For a typical nineteenth-century attitude, see the writings of the famous British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Stratford de Redcliffe, who insisted in an 1856 memorandum to the earl of Malmesbury that independent Ottoman modernization was impossible, and that "Europe is at hand, with its science, its labour, and its capital. The Koran, the harem, a Babel of languages, are no doubt so many obstacles to advancement in a Western sense." David Gillard, ed., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, Part 1: From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the First World War, Series B: The Near and Middle East 1856-1914, Volume 1: The Ottoman Empire in the Balkans 1856-1875 (Frederick, Md., 1984-85), 20. 768
Ottoman Orientalism
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Ottoman Orientalism
USSAMA MAKDISI
IN AN AGE OF WESTERN-DOMINATED MODERNITY, every nation creates its own Orient. The nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire was no exception. This article builds on several important studies that have critically analyzed how Europeans portrayed the Ottomans as a brooding non-Western despotism incapable of "progress" and how the Ottomans responded to, and resisted, these portrayals.1 But these studies have only hinted at the ramifications of non-Western responses to modern imperialism for the modality, the scope, the difference, and the meaning of Orientalist discourses as they traverse historical and national boundaries. This essay, therefore, extends Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism by looking at how Ottomans represented their own Arab periphery as an integral part of their engagement with, explicit resistance to, but also implicit acceptance of, Western representations of the indolent Ottoman East.2 Such an investigation requires a complication of the simple dichotomy of Western imperialism/non-Western resistance that has charac terized so much recent historiography of the Ottoman and non-Western world.
This essay begins by laying out the theoretical framework of what I call Ottoman Orientalism and explains the historical context within which I am using the term. It then describes a classical Ottoman imperial paradigm based on a hierarchical system of subordination along religious, class, and ethnic lines. It focuses primarily on Mount Lebanon to illustrate how an avowedly Muslim dynastic state emphasized
1 The works of Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876-1909 (London, 1998), and Zeynep <;elik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), are foundational in this regard. See also Fatma Miige G6<;ek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of the Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (New York, 1996); and M. §iikrii Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York, 1995); Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford, 2001). See K. E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece (Princeton, N.J., 1999), for an example of the manipulation of Western Orientalist imagery by Ali Pasha. For the study of power in Egypt, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, 1988).
2 Western representations of the indolent Orient were a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought, as is evident in Montesquieu's Persian Letters, to name just one famous text. This essay assumes the reader is familiar with such representations, which have been the subject of countless books and articles. For a typical nineteenth-century attitude, see the writings of the famous British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Stratford de Redcliffe, who insisted in an 1856 memorandum to the earl of Malmesbury that independent Ottoman modernization was impossible, and that "Europe is at hand, with its science, its labour, and its capital. The Koran, the harem, a Babel of languages, are no doubt so many obstacles to advancement in a Western sense." David Gillard, ed., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, Part 1: From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the First World War, Series B: The Near and Middle East 1856-1914, Volume 1: The Ottoman Empire in the Balkans 1856-1875 (Frederick, Md., 1984-85), 20.
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yet accommodated religious difference in a supposedly stable Ottoman imperial system. Finally, this article argues that the nineteenth century saw a fundamental shift from this earlier imperial paradigm into an imperial view suffused with nationalist modernization rooted in a discourse of progress. Ottoman moderniza tion supplanted an established discourse of religious subordination by a notion of temporal subordination in which an advanced imperial center reformed and disciplined backward peripheries of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire. This led to the birth of Ottoman Orientalism.
By OTTOMAN ORIENTALISM, I mean a complex of Ottoman attitudes produced by a nineteenth-century age of Ottoman reform that implicitly and explicitly acknowl edged the West to be the home of progress and the East, writ large, to be a present theater of backwardness. I am using the term Ottoman Orientalism for two interrelated reasons. First, because from the outset of nineteenth-century Ottoman reform, Ottomans recognized and responded to the power of Western Orientalism by embracing the latter's underlying logic of time and progress, while resisting its political and colonialist implications. Selim Deringil's pioneering work on the late Ottoman Empire was the first to suggest that Ottoman reform should be analyzed as an engagement with, and largely inadvertent internalization of, European representations, as much as a reaction to superior European military and technol ogy.3 Taking Deringil's argument as a point of departure, I suggest that Ottoman Orientalism was not inadvertent but a pervasive and defining facet of Ottoman modernity. Just as European Orientalism was based on an opposition between the Christian West and the Islamic Orient, the Ottomans believed that there were some essential differences that distinguished them from the West-especially a notion of Islam. As Selim Deringil and Kemal Karpat have shown, the late Ottoman Empire manipulated and subsumed a discourse of Islam within the imperative of Ottoman modernization.4 Ottoman reformers felt compelled to respond to what they saw as European misrepresentations of the Islamic East. Islam in this vein served to signify the empire's modern historical and cultural difference from the West in an era of otherwise rampant westernization.5
Second, through efforts to study, discipline, and improve imperial subjects, Ottoman reform created a notion of the pre-modern within the empire in a manner akin to the way European colonial administrators represented their colonial subjects. This process culminated in the articulation of a modern Ottoman Turkish nation that had to lead the empire's other putatively stagnant ethnic and national groups into an Ottoman modernity. Islam in this vein served to signify the empire's commonality with the Muslim majority of its subjects, but this commonality was implicitly and explicitly framed within a civilizational and temporal discourse that ultimately justified Ottoman Turkish rule over Muslim and non-Muslim subjects,
3 Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 165. 4 This argument is convincingly laid out by Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, who discusses what
he calls a "legitimation" crisis that afflicted the late Ottoman Empire, and interprets Hamidian modernization as an attempt to overcome this crisis.
5 <;elik, Displaying the Orient, 96.
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over Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Bulgarians, etc. The Orient, Islam, and the East were part of modern Ottoman self-definition in contrast to modern Western Orientalism, which, following Said, classified the Orient as inherently different from the West. But Ottoman reform distinguished between a degraded Oriental self embodied in the unreformed pre-modern subjects and landscape of the empire and the Muslim modernized self represented largely (but not exclusively) by an Ottoman Turkish elite who ruled the late Ottoman Empire.
To modernize the empire, and to make it "the free and progressive America of the East," required a massive project of imperial reform that could reform state and society at all levels.6 This began during the Tanzimat (1839-1876, literally the "ordering" of the empire), a period when the Ottoman state sought to redefine itself as more than an Islamic dynasty, as a modern, bureaucratic, and tolerant state-a partner of the West rather than its adversary. This impetus for modern ization and official nationalism expanded during the reign of Sultan Abdiilhamid II (1876-1908) under a more explicitly Islamic discourse and culminated in the Young Turk era, which lasted until World War I. Whether coded in secular or Islamic terms, Ottoman reformers acknowledged the subject position of the empire as the "sick man of Europe" only to create administrative, anthropological, and even archaeological spaces to articulate an Ottoman modernity: a state and civilization technologically equal to and temporally coeval with the West but culturally distinct from and politically independent of it. This ambivalent relationship with the West was mirrored by an equally ambivalent relationship between Ottoman rulers and subjects. Beginning with the Tanzimat, Ottoman reformers identified with these subjects as potential fellow citizens with whom they should be united in a newly defined common modern Ottoman patriotism. They also saw them as fellow victims of European intrigue and imperialism. Yet at the same time, they regarded these subjects as backward and as not-yet-Ottoman, as hindrances to as well as objects of imperial reform.
Nowhere, perhaps, was this paradox of Ottoman reform-inclusivist insofar as it sought to integrate all provinces and peoples into an official nationalism of Ottomanism and yet also temporally segregated and ultimately racially differenti ated-more apparent than in the Arab provinces of the empire. While the articulation of Ottoman reform was undeniably refracted through many experiences and in many disparate locales, from Anatoiia and the Balkans to Yemen, from the lower-class quarters of Istanbul itself to the city center of Beirut, the Arab provinces constituted increasingly important pr~)Ving grounds for Ottoman modernism, especially after the Balkan provinces broke away from Ottoman rule in 1878 and 1913. Ottoman reformers viewed their Arab provinces as places to become Ottomanized but not yet Ottoman, as places whose spatial integration into an imperial Ottomanism (connected by telegraph, monuments, rail) from Istanbul laid
6 The words are those of one of the leading poets and writers of the late Ottoman Empire, Ziya G6kalp. Quoted in Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal, 1964),332. This late Ottoman racialism was not akin to the fervent Anglo-Saxon racialism of the mid-nineteenth century United States, but it did embrace a Western enlightenment discourse of progress and the redeemability of allegedly backward peoples, albeit under central Ottoman Turkish tutelage. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
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the basis for a modernized empire. As Namik Kemal, the Young Ottoman writer and poet put it in 1872, it is from Istanbul "that the multifarious achievements of our century can be heralded to Arabia. Thus the desired future prosperity of the Islamic Caliphate will be the contribution of the Turks in the first degree but also of the Arabs in the second."7 Ottoman Oriental ism reflected the tension of this process: as the provinces were brought ever closer into the reformist imperial gaze, a general discourse of modernizing imperial reform battling backwardness justified Ottoman Turkish rule over not-yet-Ottomanized Arabs. Arab elite subjects of the late Ottoman Empire, however, participated in this elaboration of Ottoman modernity. They absorbed, replicated, and hence validated the new temporal hierarchy of Ottoman Orientalism. They also complicated Ottoman Orientalism, especially in the closing years of the empire, by proposing themselves as autono mous active subjects-interpreters and shapers-of this Ottoman modernity.
At the heart of Ottoman Orientalism was a notion of time. Ottoman reformers' acute awareness of the decline of their empire galvanized them into overhauling their empire in the nineteenth century. Istanbul was not only conceived of as the modern political center of the empire but also as the temporally highest point from which it could look down and back in time at the provinces of the empire. In short, spatial integration was justified by and consolidated temporal segregation. The development of Ottoman Orientalism can only be understood as a fundamental break with previous notions of time and imperial organization that marked the pre-reform Ottoman Empire, when imperial rule was based on an assumption of religious and ethnic differentiation but temporal integration. The Ottoman Empire in its classical age reproduced and justified itself as an orthodox Islamic dynasty superior to all other empires.8 Its theoretical imperative was to maintain an Islamic order and to preserve and uphold a status that had supposedly already been secured. The theoretical imperative of the modern Ottoman state, however, was to achieve modernity and to arrive at a position that was not yet occupied by the empire as a whole. Before the nineteenth century, the dynamic of rule was to conserve (but also to overlook) what were held to be immutable religious and ethnic differences among subjects, and to maintain an imperial distance between center and the tribute-paying peripheries of the empire, whose pre-Ottoman administra tion often persisted under pax ottomanica. After the nineteenth century, Ottoman reformers sought to nationalize (Ottomanize) the empire and ultimately to absorb the margins into a cohesive and uniform Ottoman modernity.
In thinking through the problem of Ottoman Orientalism, I have been guided by Johannes Fabian's notion of time as one of the "ideologically constructed instru ments of power" and his observation that "the relations between the West and its Other ... were conceived not only as difference, but as distance in space and
7 Quoted in ~erif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton, N.J., 1962), 332.
8 See Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), for an analysis on how this historical and historiographical construction of the Ottoman dynasty as an Islamic state proceeded. See also Abdul Karim Rafeq, "Relations between the Syrian 'Ulama and the Ottoman State in the Eighteenth Century," Oriente moderno 18 (1999): 67-95.
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Time."9 Fabian considered this "denial of co-evalness" between colonizers and colonized to be at the hear.t of nineteenth-century Western colonialism. It marked all cultures and peoples at different locations along a continuous evolutionary stream of time-the ostensible justification for modern colonialism was to over come this difference by ruling and reforming less advanced people. The Ottoman context complicates Fabian's thesis (as it does Said's), for it reveals a dialectic between European Orientalism's insistence on a stagnant Orient that had to be colonized by Europe and Ottoman Orientalism's riposte that the empire was not stagnant but independently moving-and dragging all Ottoman subjects-toward modernity. As such, Ottoman modernization, from which emerged a discourse of Ottoman Orientalism, was as much a project of power within the empire as it was an act of resistance to Western imperialism.
For this reason, Ottoman Orientalism must be distinguished from what has been characterized by some scholars as "Occidentalism."IO While it underscores the undeniable reification of the West in the minds of most nineteenth-century non-Western reformers, Occidentalism as a theory posits only a "reverse" Orien talism-"stylized images of the West" rather than of the East.!1 In the case of Ottoman studies, it misses not only the relationship between power and knowledge at the heart of Said's interpretation of Orientalism but also the layers of adaptation, emulation, and resistance-in short, the Ottoman engagement with and internal ization of an entrenched European discourse of Orientalism. 12 Rather than Occidentalism, Milica Bakic-Hayden's theory of "nesting orientalisms" is far more compelling, because it recognizes that the "gradation of 'Orients' ... is a pattern of reproduction of the original dichotomy upon which Orientalism is premised. In this pattern, Asia is more 'East' or 'other' than eastern Europe; within eastern Europe itself this gradation is reproduced with the Balkans perceived as most 'eastern.' "13 But even this concept of "nesting orientalisms" does not capture the more complicated temporal implications of Ottoman Orientalism. The notion of "bal kanism" proposed by Maria Todorova as a wavering form, as no longer Oriental yet not European, better evokes the ambiguity inherent in Ottoman Orientalism. It posited an empire in "decline" yet capable of an independent renaissance, westernized but not Western, leader of a reinvigorated Orient yet no longer of the "Orient" represented by the West, nor that embodied in its unreformed subjects,14 Ottoman Orientalism accommodated both strictly secularist and explicitly Islamist
9 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), 144-47.
10 See Carter Vaughn Findley, "An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Giilnar, 1889," AHR 103 (February 1998): 15-49. Findley, following Xiaomei Chen, suggests that "Occidentalism" is a "counter-discourse" to Orientalism. This reading misses Said's central point about the profound and extensive linkage between the representation of the Orient and a European! American will to dominate the Orient. See also Xiaomei Chen, accidentalism: A Theory of Counter Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York, 1995), 5. For Chen, "Occidentalism" constitutes the "essentialization" of the West, which was used by Chinese themselves in a variety of ways.
11 James G. Carrier, accidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford, 1995), 6. 12 Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 157-58. Fleming'S work on Ali Pasha is also an exception, but
her work is concerned with how Ali Pasha manipulated and participated in but did not fundamentally alter Orientalist imagery.
13 Milica Bakic-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Slavic Review 54 (1995): 918.
14 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997), 17. I acknowledge, of course, that
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interpretations of modern Ottoman identity. It discredited Western representations of Ottoman indolence by contrasting Ottoman modernity with the unreformed and stagnant landscape of the empire. In effect, it de-Orientalized the empire by Orientalizing it.
IN ITS CLASSICAL AGE, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE was legitimized by Islamic symbolism, particularly through the facilitation and protection of the annual Hajj but also by a notion of imperial benevolence that safeguarded the lives and property of Muslim and non-Muslim subjects.15 The Ottomans accepted the presence of Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish communities as an integral, if subordinate, part of the empire.16 At the same time, however, the Ottoman sultans described themselves as inheritors of a ghazi tradition that was constantly expanding the frontiers of Islam against the infidel kingdoms; and, after the conquest of Damascus and Arabia in 1516 and Cairo in 1517, they also posited themselves as guardians of Mecca and Medina. Religion and ethnicity were crucial markers of difference in the Ottoman system-they helped define what it meant to be an Ottoman: a member of the ruling elite, urban, above all aware of multiple ethnicities, a Muslim in the service of the sultan who from Istanbul ruled over a vast polyglot empire composed of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, of Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Albanians, and Kurds, Bosnians, Greeks, and a host of other populations.
The seventeenth-century Seyahatname, or Book of Travels, of the famous Ottoman chronicler Evliya <::elebi expresses this fusion of privilege, urbanity, class, patronage, and Sunni Islam that defined being Ottoman. If Istanbul was the "abode of felicity," the frontiers of the empire were its antithesis: regions where heresy flourished, locales of strange and often comical stories, and arenas where Ottomans "proved" their Islamic identity and yet reconciled themselves to the fact of a multi-religious and ethnic empireP The Seyahatname reveals just how deep the religious and ethnic consciousness of Ottomans ran in the late seventeenth century. For example, <::e1ebi's description of his patron Melek Ahmed Pasha's punishment of the "dog worshippers, worse than infidels, a band of rebels and brigands and perverts, resembling ghouls of the desert, hairy heretic Yezidi Kurds" near Diyarbekir in Anatolia reflects one of the central tenets of the Ottoman imperial system: not simply the existence of a profound difference between Ottoman rulers and many of the subjects they ruled but the unbridgeable nature of this difference. Melek Ahmed Pasha sent seventy regiments of soldiers in addition to his retinue of "Abkhazian and Circassian and Georgian braves-who shamed one another in
Todorova's argument about "Balkanism" was precisely that it is not a variant of Orientalism but its own construct.
15 Karl K. Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708-1758 (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 108-09. 16 See Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn, "Problems in the Ottoman Administration in Syria during the
16th and 17th Centuries: The Case of the Sanjak of Sidon-Beirut," International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 665-75.
17 See in this regard Robert Dankoff's translation of selections of Evliya <;elebi's Book of Travels under the title The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman, Melek Ahmed Pasha (Albany, N.Y., 1991), 249-50. See also…
USSAMA MAKDISI
IN AN AGE OF WESTERN-DOMINATED MODERNITY, every nation creates its own Orient. The nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire was no exception. This article builds on several important studies that have critically analyzed how Europeans portrayed the Ottomans as a brooding non-Western despotism incapable of "progress" and how the Ottomans responded to, and resisted, these portrayals.1 But these studies have only hinted at the ramifications of non-Western responses to modern imperialism for the modality, the scope, the difference, and the meaning of Orientalist discourses as they traverse historical and national boundaries. This essay, therefore, extends Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism by looking at how Ottomans represented their own Arab periphery as an integral part of their engagement with, explicit resistance to, but also implicit acceptance of, Western representations of the indolent Ottoman East.2 Such an investigation requires a complication of the simple dichotomy of Western imperialism/non-Western resistance that has charac terized so much recent historiography of the Ottoman and non-Western world.
This essay begins by laying out the theoretical framework of what I call Ottoman Orientalism and explains the historical context within which I am using the term. It then describes a classical Ottoman imperial paradigm based on a hierarchical system of subordination along religious, class, and ethnic lines. It focuses primarily on Mount Lebanon to illustrate how an avowedly Muslim dynastic state emphasized
1 The works of Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876-1909 (London, 1998), and Zeynep <;elik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), are foundational in this regard. See also Fatma Miige G6<;ek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of the Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (New York, 1996); and M. §iikrii Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York, 1995); Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford, 2001). See K. E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece (Princeton, N.J., 1999), for an example of the manipulation of Western Orientalist imagery by Ali Pasha. For the study of power in Egypt, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, 1988).
2 Western representations of the indolent Orient were a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought, as is evident in Montesquieu's Persian Letters, to name just one famous text. This essay assumes the reader is familiar with such representations, which have been the subject of countless books and articles. For a typical nineteenth-century attitude, see the writings of the famous British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Stratford de Redcliffe, who insisted in an 1856 memorandum to the earl of Malmesbury that independent Ottoman modernization was impossible, and that "Europe is at hand, with its science, its labour, and its capital. The Koran, the harem, a Babel of languages, are no doubt so many obstacles to advancement in a Western sense." David Gillard, ed., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, Part 1: From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the First World War, Series B: The Near and Middle East 1856-1914, Volume 1: The Ottoman Empire in the Balkans 1856-1875 (Frederick, Md., 1984-85), 20.
768
Ottoman Orientalism 769
yet accommodated religious difference in a supposedly stable Ottoman imperial system. Finally, this article argues that the nineteenth century saw a fundamental shift from this earlier imperial paradigm into an imperial view suffused with nationalist modernization rooted in a discourse of progress. Ottoman moderniza tion supplanted an established discourse of religious subordination by a notion of temporal subordination in which an advanced imperial center reformed and disciplined backward peripheries of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire. This led to the birth of Ottoman Orientalism.
By OTTOMAN ORIENTALISM, I mean a complex of Ottoman attitudes produced by a nineteenth-century age of Ottoman reform that implicitly and explicitly acknowl edged the West to be the home of progress and the East, writ large, to be a present theater of backwardness. I am using the term Ottoman Orientalism for two interrelated reasons. First, because from the outset of nineteenth-century Ottoman reform, Ottomans recognized and responded to the power of Western Orientalism by embracing the latter's underlying logic of time and progress, while resisting its political and colonialist implications. Selim Deringil's pioneering work on the late Ottoman Empire was the first to suggest that Ottoman reform should be analyzed as an engagement with, and largely inadvertent internalization of, European representations, as much as a reaction to superior European military and technol ogy.3 Taking Deringil's argument as a point of departure, I suggest that Ottoman Orientalism was not inadvertent but a pervasive and defining facet of Ottoman modernity. Just as European Orientalism was based on an opposition between the Christian West and the Islamic Orient, the Ottomans believed that there were some essential differences that distinguished them from the West-especially a notion of Islam. As Selim Deringil and Kemal Karpat have shown, the late Ottoman Empire manipulated and subsumed a discourse of Islam within the imperative of Ottoman modernization.4 Ottoman reformers felt compelled to respond to what they saw as European misrepresentations of the Islamic East. Islam in this vein served to signify the empire's modern historical and cultural difference from the West in an era of otherwise rampant westernization.5
Second, through efforts to study, discipline, and improve imperial subjects, Ottoman reform created a notion of the pre-modern within the empire in a manner akin to the way European colonial administrators represented their colonial subjects. This process culminated in the articulation of a modern Ottoman Turkish nation that had to lead the empire's other putatively stagnant ethnic and national groups into an Ottoman modernity. Islam in this vein served to signify the empire's commonality with the Muslim majority of its subjects, but this commonality was implicitly and explicitly framed within a civilizational and temporal discourse that ultimately justified Ottoman Turkish rule over Muslim and non-Muslim subjects,
3 Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 165. 4 This argument is convincingly laid out by Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, who discusses what
he calls a "legitimation" crisis that afflicted the late Ottoman Empire, and interprets Hamidian modernization as an attempt to overcome this crisis.
5 <;elik, Displaying the Orient, 96.
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over Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Bulgarians, etc. The Orient, Islam, and the East were part of modern Ottoman self-definition in contrast to modern Western Orientalism, which, following Said, classified the Orient as inherently different from the West. But Ottoman reform distinguished between a degraded Oriental self embodied in the unreformed pre-modern subjects and landscape of the empire and the Muslim modernized self represented largely (but not exclusively) by an Ottoman Turkish elite who ruled the late Ottoman Empire.
To modernize the empire, and to make it "the free and progressive America of the East," required a massive project of imperial reform that could reform state and society at all levels.6 This began during the Tanzimat (1839-1876, literally the "ordering" of the empire), a period when the Ottoman state sought to redefine itself as more than an Islamic dynasty, as a modern, bureaucratic, and tolerant state-a partner of the West rather than its adversary. This impetus for modern ization and official nationalism expanded during the reign of Sultan Abdiilhamid II (1876-1908) under a more explicitly Islamic discourse and culminated in the Young Turk era, which lasted until World War I. Whether coded in secular or Islamic terms, Ottoman reformers acknowledged the subject position of the empire as the "sick man of Europe" only to create administrative, anthropological, and even archaeological spaces to articulate an Ottoman modernity: a state and civilization technologically equal to and temporally coeval with the West but culturally distinct from and politically independent of it. This ambivalent relationship with the West was mirrored by an equally ambivalent relationship between Ottoman rulers and subjects. Beginning with the Tanzimat, Ottoman reformers identified with these subjects as potential fellow citizens with whom they should be united in a newly defined common modern Ottoman patriotism. They also saw them as fellow victims of European intrigue and imperialism. Yet at the same time, they regarded these subjects as backward and as not-yet-Ottoman, as hindrances to as well as objects of imperial reform.
Nowhere, perhaps, was this paradox of Ottoman reform-inclusivist insofar as it sought to integrate all provinces and peoples into an official nationalism of Ottomanism and yet also temporally segregated and ultimately racially differenti ated-more apparent than in the Arab provinces of the empire. While the articulation of Ottoman reform was undeniably refracted through many experiences and in many disparate locales, from Anatoiia and the Balkans to Yemen, from the lower-class quarters of Istanbul itself to the city center of Beirut, the Arab provinces constituted increasingly important pr~)Ving grounds for Ottoman modernism, especially after the Balkan provinces broke away from Ottoman rule in 1878 and 1913. Ottoman reformers viewed their Arab provinces as places to become Ottomanized but not yet Ottoman, as places whose spatial integration into an imperial Ottomanism (connected by telegraph, monuments, rail) from Istanbul laid
6 The words are those of one of the leading poets and writers of the late Ottoman Empire, Ziya G6kalp. Quoted in Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal, 1964),332. This late Ottoman racialism was not akin to the fervent Anglo-Saxon racialism of the mid-nineteenth century United States, but it did embrace a Western enlightenment discourse of progress and the redeemability of allegedly backward peoples, albeit under central Ottoman Turkish tutelage. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
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the basis for a modernized empire. As Namik Kemal, the Young Ottoman writer and poet put it in 1872, it is from Istanbul "that the multifarious achievements of our century can be heralded to Arabia. Thus the desired future prosperity of the Islamic Caliphate will be the contribution of the Turks in the first degree but also of the Arabs in the second."7 Ottoman Oriental ism reflected the tension of this process: as the provinces were brought ever closer into the reformist imperial gaze, a general discourse of modernizing imperial reform battling backwardness justified Ottoman Turkish rule over not-yet-Ottomanized Arabs. Arab elite subjects of the late Ottoman Empire, however, participated in this elaboration of Ottoman modernity. They absorbed, replicated, and hence validated the new temporal hierarchy of Ottoman Orientalism. They also complicated Ottoman Orientalism, especially in the closing years of the empire, by proposing themselves as autono mous active subjects-interpreters and shapers-of this Ottoman modernity.
At the heart of Ottoman Orientalism was a notion of time. Ottoman reformers' acute awareness of the decline of their empire galvanized them into overhauling their empire in the nineteenth century. Istanbul was not only conceived of as the modern political center of the empire but also as the temporally highest point from which it could look down and back in time at the provinces of the empire. In short, spatial integration was justified by and consolidated temporal segregation. The development of Ottoman Orientalism can only be understood as a fundamental break with previous notions of time and imperial organization that marked the pre-reform Ottoman Empire, when imperial rule was based on an assumption of religious and ethnic differentiation but temporal integration. The Ottoman Empire in its classical age reproduced and justified itself as an orthodox Islamic dynasty superior to all other empires.8 Its theoretical imperative was to maintain an Islamic order and to preserve and uphold a status that had supposedly already been secured. The theoretical imperative of the modern Ottoman state, however, was to achieve modernity and to arrive at a position that was not yet occupied by the empire as a whole. Before the nineteenth century, the dynamic of rule was to conserve (but also to overlook) what were held to be immutable religious and ethnic differences among subjects, and to maintain an imperial distance between center and the tribute-paying peripheries of the empire, whose pre-Ottoman administra tion often persisted under pax ottomanica. After the nineteenth century, Ottoman reformers sought to nationalize (Ottomanize) the empire and ultimately to absorb the margins into a cohesive and uniform Ottoman modernity.
In thinking through the problem of Ottoman Orientalism, I have been guided by Johannes Fabian's notion of time as one of the "ideologically constructed instru ments of power" and his observation that "the relations between the West and its Other ... were conceived not only as difference, but as distance in space and
7 Quoted in ~erif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton, N.J., 1962), 332.
8 See Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), for an analysis on how this historical and historiographical construction of the Ottoman dynasty as an Islamic state proceeded. See also Abdul Karim Rafeq, "Relations between the Syrian 'Ulama and the Ottoman State in the Eighteenth Century," Oriente moderno 18 (1999): 67-95.
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Time."9 Fabian considered this "denial of co-evalness" between colonizers and colonized to be at the hear.t of nineteenth-century Western colonialism. It marked all cultures and peoples at different locations along a continuous evolutionary stream of time-the ostensible justification for modern colonialism was to over come this difference by ruling and reforming less advanced people. The Ottoman context complicates Fabian's thesis (as it does Said's), for it reveals a dialectic between European Orientalism's insistence on a stagnant Orient that had to be colonized by Europe and Ottoman Orientalism's riposte that the empire was not stagnant but independently moving-and dragging all Ottoman subjects-toward modernity. As such, Ottoman modernization, from which emerged a discourse of Ottoman Orientalism, was as much a project of power within the empire as it was an act of resistance to Western imperialism.
For this reason, Ottoman Orientalism must be distinguished from what has been characterized by some scholars as "Occidentalism."IO While it underscores the undeniable reification of the West in the minds of most nineteenth-century non-Western reformers, Occidentalism as a theory posits only a "reverse" Orien talism-"stylized images of the West" rather than of the East.!1 In the case of Ottoman studies, it misses not only the relationship between power and knowledge at the heart of Said's interpretation of Orientalism but also the layers of adaptation, emulation, and resistance-in short, the Ottoman engagement with and internal ization of an entrenched European discourse of Orientalism. 12 Rather than Occidentalism, Milica Bakic-Hayden's theory of "nesting orientalisms" is far more compelling, because it recognizes that the "gradation of 'Orients' ... is a pattern of reproduction of the original dichotomy upon which Orientalism is premised. In this pattern, Asia is more 'East' or 'other' than eastern Europe; within eastern Europe itself this gradation is reproduced with the Balkans perceived as most 'eastern.' "13 But even this concept of "nesting orientalisms" does not capture the more complicated temporal implications of Ottoman Orientalism. The notion of "bal kanism" proposed by Maria Todorova as a wavering form, as no longer Oriental yet not European, better evokes the ambiguity inherent in Ottoman Orientalism. It posited an empire in "decline" yet capable of an independent renaissance, westernized but not Western, leader of a reinvigorated Orient yet no longer of the "Orient" represented by the West, nor that embodied in its unreformed subjects,14 Ottoman Orientalism accommodated both strictly secularist and explicitly Islamist
9 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), 144-47.
10 See Carter Vaughn Findley, "An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Giilnar, 1889," AHR 103 (February 1998): 15-49. Findley, following Xiaomei Chen, suggests that "Occidentalism" is a "counter-discourse" to Orientalism. This reading misses Said's central point about the profound and extensive linkage between the representation of the Orient and a European! American will to dominate the Orient. See also Xiaomei Chen, accidentalism: A Theory of Counter Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York, 1995), 5. For Chen, "Occidentalism" constitutes the "essentialization" of the West, which was used by Chinese themselves in a variety of ways.
11 James G. Carrier, accidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford, 1995), 6. 12 Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 157-58. Fleming'S work on Ali Pasha is also an exception, but
her work is concerned with how Ali Pasha manipulated and participated in but did not fundamentally alter Orientalist imagery.
13 Milica Bakic-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Slavic Review 54 (1995): 918.
14 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997), 17. I acknowledge, of course, that
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interpretations of modern Ottoman identity. It discredited Western representations of Ottoman indolence by contrasting Ottoman modernity with the unreformed and stagnant landscape of the empire. In effect, it de-Orientalized the empire by Orientalizing it.
IN ITS CLASSICAL AGE, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE was legitimized by Islamic symbolism, particularly through the facilitation and protection of the annual Hajj but also by a notion of imperial benevolence that safeguarded the lives and property of Muslim and non-Muslim subjects.15 The Ottomans accepted the presence of Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish communities as an integral, if subordinate, part of the empire.16 At the same time, however, the Ottoman sultans described themselves as inheritors of a ghazi tradition that was constantly expanding the frontiers of Islam against the infidel kingdoms; and, after the conquest of Damascus and Arabia in 1516 and Cairo in 1517, they also posited themselves as guardians of Mecca and Medina. Religion and ethnicity were crucial markers of difference in the Ottoman system-they helped define what it meant to be an Ottoman: a member of the ruling elite, urban, above all aware of multiple ethnicities, a Muslim in the service of the sultan who from Istanbul ruled over a vast polyglot empire composed of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, of Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Albanians, and Kurds, Bosnians, Greeks, and a host of other populations.
The seventeenth-century Seyahatname, or Book of Travels, of the famous Ottoman chronicler Evliya <::elebi expresses this fusion of privilege, urbanity, class, patronage, and Sunni Islam that defined being Ottoman. If Istanbul was the "abode of felicity," the frontiers of the empire were its antithesis: regions where heresy flourished, locales of strange and often comical stories, and arenas where Ottomans "proved" their Islamic identity and yet reconciled themselves to the fact of a multi-religious and ethnic empireP The Seyahatname reveals just how deep the religious and ethnic consciousness of Ottomans ran in the late seventeenth century. For example, <::e1ebi's description of his patron Melek Ahmed Pasha's punishment of the "dog worshippers, worse than infidels, a band of rebels and brigands and perverts, resembling ghouls of the desert, hairy heretic Yezidi Kurds" near Diyarbekir in Anatolia reflects one of the central tenets of the Ottoman imperial system: not simply the existence of a profound difference between Ottoman rulers and many of the subjects they ruled but the unbridgeable nature of this difference. Melek Ahmed Pasha sent seventy regiments of soldiers in addition to his retinue of "Abkhazian and Circassian and Georgian braves-who shamed one another in
Todorova's argument about "Balkanism" was precisely that it is not a variant of Orientalism but its own construct.
15 Karl K. Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708-1758 (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 108-09. 16 See Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn, "Problems in the Ottoman Administration in Syria during the
16th and 17th Centuries: The Case of the Sanjak of Sidon-Beirut," International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 665-75.
17 See in this regard Robert Dankoff's translation of selections of Evliya <;elebi's Book of Travels under the title The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman, Melek Ahmed Pasha (Albany, N.Y., 1991), 249-50. See also…
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